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A
Short for the Long Fellow
IM
John Heath-Stubbs (1918-2006) Less a The
slapstick of poetry
was yours. But the laugh was not a line. When the leaves fell you stood
out,
looking as though struck by lightning. Your eyes were yokes. Those who
sat at your
feet were playfully kick-started into a world where to know where you
stood was
to become your own statue. So leglessness was a solution. I see you
reflecting
in tranquility on a cloud, gently mocking Wordsworth.
‘Shelley is another
matter’, you said. That was final. I thought you were Walter
Savage Landor
crossed with Coventry Kersey Patmore with a touch of Peacock. You had
more
staying power than George Barker because you knew how to move on. I’d
be happy to grant
the Queen of England a pardon if she made you the Poet Laureate
posthumously.
Or at least Poetry’s Head Gardener. Your topiary could rise
to any occasion.
This would mean weeding out Andrew Motion, and uprooting the common
ground to
plant proud oaks. ‘The present is beyond redemption. So much
has been allowed
to go to seed since classical times. It’s time to civilise
the past.’ The watch
you consulted was stopped. You walked
in Hampton
Court, amongst the labyrinth of box trees, and ever-so-scarcely noticed
the
people laughing as you emblazoned roses on bowers. What a sensible
commotion
you created around you. But the mind has its own order, and your poems
found
their place. Stubbs in the Heath. ‘Where are my
cigarettes?’ Home
‘How angry the Nid
de poule is
the French for potholes. We have been rerouted off the motorway because
of the
storm. I’m driving on eggshells. Suspension, suspense. Don’t get worked up
you’re working me up. ‘A
temps-pest could translate nuisance weather’, I say. The
storm
disappears back into the mountains, flashing sheets of light. Static
lingers in
the air. The air terminal is suddenly there. ‘Not this desk,
but the one over
there’, says check-in, ‘and then come
back.’ Real money is refused though the
computer won’t register my plastic. Don’t get worked up
you’re working me up.
‘Won’t you even take a bribe?’ I say,
fingering my wad. An officious woman does
not smile. I see the last of you, boarding. People before walking on
air always
look lost. But you know where you’re going, destination
announced. The steps
are being wheeled away. Returning,
I
could be taking off on wings of spray as I plough through the flooding.
The
drain before our door is clogged with leaves. In this downpour I might
as well
swim in the sea. I find a cave for my clothes and jump in. The shock of
the
cold. The sun has not shone for three days. Floating, I think I see
your plane
pass overhead. I
take to my
bed, and dream of a simpler time. Waiting together in a small airport
in the
middle of nowhere. You are reading, and I am pacing around. We are
going to the
centre of the world where nobody has a shadow. I
wake up and I
hear myself saying, I’ve shared most of my life with you and
I don’t know who
you are. I am talking to myself. It’s after midnight. You
will have landed by
now. I can’t wait for you to boomerang back.
The Mystical
Tapestry
Paul Valéry, examining figures
embroidered in silk
by an unknown medieval artist, attributed to the tapestry a mystical
dimension.
Held up to the light, the figures disappear in the hunting scene,
transforming
the tapestry to its essence, the artist’s chase to hunt down
with his hand and
eye the soul of his craft and make it his own. The threads drawn to
entwine
that coming together could be unravelled from his life, and the
peasants around
him who cultivated silk worms and harvested them, the makers of the
mysterious
dyes, the nobleman who ordered up a scene from his life to be captured
in silk.
Valéry concluded that if you only see a hunt you see
nothing, nothing you have
not seen before. Bouleverser
IM M. Guittet Endymion
(1965-2006) The thin man is beautiful when he plays
boules. The
run up is as smooth as that of a slow medium paced cricket bowler, only
the
delivery is underarm. The whip of his action is almost invisible. The
ball
flights and curls in the air. Thin
is an
exaggeration. He scarcely exists beyond the one-dimensional until the
wisp of
his body elongates in full flow. Close cropped head round as the ball,
white
drainpipes, tight vest, springy trainers soled with a doorstep of crepe. He
plays
Lyonnaise boules, a game for warriors which is disappearing into a
postprandial
pastime to work off the wine. Common boules, with its stand-start and
egg and
spoon follow through, is the French equivalent to a constitutional. Nevertheless
it
has a national federation with ambitions for boules as an Olympic
sport. Though
it’s only a few steps above watching television. The name has
been changed to
pétanque and competitions regularised. But the image of
tipsy types with butts
stuck to the lip with nothing better to do dies hard. Wherever there is
bare
ground in The
thin man
lives across the landing with a round-faced woman of a certain age
whose eyes
go rheumy when she smiles. He is the houseboy, I think. She never goes
out.
Glimpses of their apartment intimate genteel disorder. Sometimes he
brings her
flowers. In
the small
hours the thin man practises in the square by the light of the moon. He
throws
a wooden ball studded with nails rather than the common steel one. I
don’t
understand the game any more than ballet. So I don’t know how
good he is. But I
recognise a Nureyev when I see one. When
I meet him
at Chez Martial, the baker, he is as formal as a famous sportsman. The
hand is
firmly pressed with the ‘Comment allez-vous?’
I ask him, ‘How goes the
boules?’, and he answers, ‘I haven’t got
it right yet’. His morning breath
smells of wine. Welsh tells me it’s his medical preparation.
He paces himself
through the day with libations which give him confidence and a steady
hand.
White wine is his beta-blocker. The
federation
has banned smoking and drinking in competitions, and made uniforms
compulsory.
Clubs are applying the rules draconically. The thin man has been
dropped from
the local team. He refused to wear the standard issue gear and
sometimes lapsed
into Lyonnaise in the middle of a match. The
nocturnal
practising continues. The thin man performs to the moon, sharp now as a
blade
of grass. As dawn comes up he goes home. Often he is locked out. I hear
him
banging on the door. Sometimes he sleeps on the stairs. The
other night
he did not return. Nobody knows where he is. Some say he tried to
embrace the
moon over the yellow river. I know better. The moon descended on the
thin man
and kissed him, and he fell into an everlasting game of boules for her
to watch
forever without disturbance. The wooden ball studded with star shards
donkey-drops
on the red marble, and ricochets off the yellow one.
Eyes
IM Claude Jade (1948-2006) You had the second best eyes in French
film. I see
them regard J-P Leaud with amused pity in Truffaut’s Stolen
Kisses.
Arletty’s as Garance in The Children of Paradise visited
J-L Barrault’s
with pitiless love. Hers were golden-blue, yours blue-grey with a
silver
lining. But they came from the same sky. Eyes
that say
everything are not good. When least expected they turn on themselves.
Arletty
lost hers to a Luftwafte pilot and, after the war, not being able to
look
people in the eye, they went blind from desuetude. Yours saw the
sadness of
things as they are and disappeared into cancer. Ogham:
A Conceptual Poem
My original intention was to write a poem
in Ogham.
The Stone Age language of the Celts never had a literature. Its twenty
letters
were cut in diagonal dashes with orb relief, not unlike a game of
noughts and
crosses. They were mainly used to mark property boundaries, warning
notices in
fields. Beware
of the
Bull of Coolin. That
sort of
thing. Ogham represents the only written evidence in early Irish law.
The poets
perpetuated the statutes orally, not unlike the British Constitution
and the
Law Lords. I dropped the idea of an Ogham poem. But
for those
who wish to rise to the challenge here is the Ogham alphabet (artwork
by Marita
Llinares):
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